“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Not really,” he said, looking out onto the stubble of a clear cut they happened to be passing.
They drove on in silence for while, her Jeep juddering over the potholes and washboard, floating around the curves, and jouncing up the straight sections fearlessly. They’d driven into Lake Cowichan, where she’d purchased a jerrycan full of gas to put into the Matrix, and were heading back to Nixon Creek.
“Mind if I get a bit pushy on this?”
“Would you mind if I minded?”
“How ‘bout we back into things, Buddy, starting with ‘…it was a stupid thing to do’?”
He felt her waiting, the pressure of her patience.
“What made you say that?”
“Have you ever been depressed, Andy?”
“No. Not really. I’ve been sad, disappointed, frustrated—incredibly frustrated. But those feelings only make me want to push harder and fight to get my way.”
“You’re fire,” he said.
“Huh?”
“I’m water.”
“Huh?”
“Water follows the laws of gravity. It drops out of the sky, seeps over the land and into the soil, pools in underground caverns, and gushes through canyons, always heading down, down toward the sea—to the deepest, most mysterious, darkest depths of the sea. Sorry to be obscure, but water seeks a place beyond logic, and we all know there is no such place where an artist can hide.”
“Okay. Sounds pretty depressing,” she agreed, tincturing her comment with a note of humour.
“No! You’re not reading me right. Water-types want places where they can be still, collected, immersed in the potential of silence, where you can feel… always feel… the minutest possible vibrations of the world and give them meaning.”
“What’s that got to do with offing yourself? Or a career as a journalist, for that matter?”
Buddy smiled at the contrast between the harshness of her words and the softness of their delivery. “I do love you,” he said. “You, more than anyone I know, make me want to at least try to explain things.”
“Don’t change the subject, man.”
“I have a hard time saying ‘I love you’ to almost anyone. I can say it to you. You make me feel worthy, Andy.”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“I think there’s all kinds of reasons for committing suicide. I wish I had a better excuse—that I was ravaged with pain, or driven by desperation, the truth is, I was bored. Not in the normal way, like a guy who’s annoyed because he can’t think of anything to do on a Sunday afternoon, but utterly, incurably bored with a life that had no meaning and no possibility of meaning. A pointless life. I wanted to sink into the silence beyond silence, if that makes any sense.”
They drove on for a while, Andrea focused on the road ahead, Buddy on the scenery flashing by.
“And fire?”
“Up! Up! Always up. You’re spontaneous combustion, girl.”
She laughed, slapping the steering wheel. “What are you on about? You sound like a woman’s sportswear commercial—one concocted by men.”
“The sparks from a fire burn people nearby, its heat warms them. An ember from a fire starts another fire. Water collects, fire radiates and spreads. A fire needs fuel; water never, ever runs out of gravity…”
“Water douses a fire,” she said.
“Fire makes a pot of water boil,” he countered.
“Okay! Enough with the analogy. I get it… sort of. But I need to know what changed your mind, Buddy? What made you say, ‘…it was a stupid thing to do?’ I need to know that, because I want to believe it—I want to believe that you believe it.”
“You, Gloria, Robbie, Leanne, Harry, Bernice… the thought of deliberately extinguishing my hopes for the people I love should have caused me more pain…”
“Should have?” Andrea interrupted.
“You asked; let me answer,” he scolded. “Gimme time.
“I realized, as I was sinking into my self-induced coma, that the only meaning in my life—call it purpose, if you want—was the love I have for my family and friends, my community, my world. I was cutting short my capacity to give and to celebrate moments of achievement, to enjoy the wonder of just being…
“Why?” he asked.
“Dunno. You tell me.”
“Because I’d lost sight of the fact that ‘giving’ is our goal in life. I was so busy feeling sorry for myself because life wasn’t giving me what I needed that I forgot what I’d never really consciously stated: that giving is my raison d’être, to give everything I can, for as long as I can, to as many people as possible. It’s our only joy, really, as far as I can see. And making the world a little bit better is our only real pleasure.
“I guess I was at a point where I thought—subconsciously—I have nothing left to give that’s worth the giving.
“But you’ve always been a giving man, Buddy. Haven’t you?”
“Yes, I suppose. But it never occurred to me that ‘giving’ was the whole point—that achievement isn’t an endless quest to acquire more; it’s building a world where we’re capable of giving more. Cutting my life short while I still had it in me to give was a denial of everything I’ve ever really stood for. In that sense, it was a sin.”
“Holy shit! You realized all that before the Matrix ran out of gas?”
“Thanks for asking, Andy,” he laughed. “Thanks for making me answer,” he added when she glanced his way between potholes.
“You’re weird, man.”
Her eyes flicked back to the road ahead as she downshifted into a hairpin. “Praise the Lord I don’t necessarily believe in for species diversity!”
“Amen,” he said. “Amen to that.”
Next: Past Tense